Tales of the Aggronaut

Blood of the Werewolf

October 12, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode #26

I feel like last night was a really good episode, or at least I hope it is. It is one of those nights where the conversation flowed freely and we had way more topics to talk about than we realistically had time to do so. Even at that we still recorded for roughly an hour and a half and it is completely packed full of stuff. The title of the show is the “Gospel of Galaxy Trucker” and that is because Kodra has become an evangelist for the power of that game. He has always been a big fan of the board game, and has latched onto the iOS port with both hands trying to get as many people to play with him as possible. Problem is for me at least I don’t have any iOS devices, and I sadly doubt that android and iOS users will be able to play together…. although in Carcassonne you could play across platforms so here is hoping.

Other than that we talked at length about Dragon Age: Origin and mostly how Kodra has been getting along in the game. He had tried to play it before in the past but was unable to get into it, so it seems as though he is at least over the hurdle. As we refer to it “Getting Off Citadel” because that was the big hurdle of when Mass Effect 1 started to become interesting, and getting past Lothering in Dragon Age is a similar journey. I talk at length about my issues with Destiny right now and the mindless grinding that is required to keep progressing. I am far more grind friendly than the rest of my cast mates but even I am starting to hit my limit. Finally we talk about the tell tale blank spots in the Blizzcon lineup and contemplate what they might be announcing. We throw out a bunch of ideas for a new game genre for them to polish to a mirror shine.

Blood of the Werewolf

I picked this up some time ago on a Steam sale because it had two things that greatly interested me. Firstly the fact that you were playing as a female werewolf looking for revenge for her slain husband was an interesting spin on the genre. Secondly it looked in many ways similar to the original Castlevania with a series of levels that show your progression in form of a minimap. The dual mechanics of “human” and “werewolf” modes seemed interesting as well. So for this mornings Steampowered Sunday I decided to give it a spin and play it for a bit. I was not really feeling up to interacting with the world so I opted not to stream it, however I did take lots of screenshots along the way. This however is a review that almost didn’t happen because apparently this game is essentially broken without massive intervention. When I launched it the first time I started getting C++ debug errors, and since I am programmer by trade and have visual studio installed… it kept asking me if I wanted to launch a debugger to step through the code.

It turns out this is a “known issue” and simply has not been patched. In fact there is a “helpful” thread on the steam forums on how to fix it. I put helpful in quotes because the “fix” requires you to edit your registry and hard code the resolution you want to run the game at. This is a horrible horrible decision, and I damned near stopped playing the game at this point. If you put a game on steam you should at least have a way to configure your games resolution without resorting to the registry. Quite honestly this right along makes me not recommend this game for anyone at this point. I feel like more than likely the current $1.04 pricetag and the regular $7.00 pricetag maybe reflects the fact that this game has some shitty development behind it. All of this said… the registry hack seemed to clear up my problems.

Charming Narrative

The art style and voice acting are really nicely done. I maybe should have used charming in quotes… since in reality you are going across the country side on a revenge fueled murder spree. But I guess in reality the original Castlevania didn’t give you much of a reason why you were going after Dracula… so it works here as well. The game is told from the perspective of the mother telling her son what she had to do to seek revenge for the killing of his father. I am not sure if this is like a journal that the son is reading, but it seems likely. Which makes me wonder does your character simply not survive in the end. I have not played enough yet to really be able to determine that, nor do I know if I will play enough, but I can get into the reasons behind that later.

The only problem I have is that the enemies you face are mostly random monsters… and while the rats and crocodiles and even other wolves make sense… I have no clue why there are giant fireball belching deep ones in the sewer system as well other than a faint nod to Castlevania. I feel like the game didn’t really explain who I was fighting against other than someone killed my husband and the father of the person reading the narration. What helps me care less about all of this is just how nice the characters and background end up looking. It is very stylistic but at the same time still richly detailed without going overly minimalistic.

Interesting Mechanics

The gameplay is split into two different kinds of mechanics. The first is that of your character as a human. She is equipped with a crossbow and here is where things get a little wonky. You aim your crossbow with your right thumb stick and fire it with your right trigger. Now if you fire your cross bow without touching your thumb stick it shoots straight at, but there are many times where you will need to angle a shot. The ability to fire directed arrows allows you to hit switches and trigger traps and angle shots just right to be able to shoot from relative safety. All of this however in practice feels like a lot to do as something is rushing at you. I got the hang of it as my play test went on, but it did not feel exactly intuitive at first.

Whenever your character goes out into the moonlight, you change immediately into your werewolf form which has a completely different set of attacks but maintains the same basic control scheme. Right trigger to attack, right shoulder to perform special ability. In werewolf form you get the ability to double jump, so a lot of the puzzles involve you jumping just at the right time in the middle of the air. One of the things they carried over from Castlevania is the constant cavalcade of bats timed at just the right spacing as to make it damned near impossible to ignore them, but futile to actually try and destroy them. Later the bats develop the same kind of loping movement as the medusa heads from Castlevania which makes them even more frustrating.

Uneven Difficulty

Other than the fact that the game does not actually run when you install it through steam without registry hack intervention… my number one complaint about the game is that it seems to have very uneven difficulty design in the levels. Granted the original Castlevania had this going on as well, but it was very much not a good feature. I feel like this game as a whole is a nostalgic nod to Castlevania in so many ways, and it even managed to carry over the same brutal and frustrating bits that quite frankly were just the product of poor level design rather than actual planning I feel. I played the first two levels this morning, and in each of them the bulk of the level was rather sedate with logical progression gradually ramping up as you went through the play field.

Then they would throw you at a bullet hell section, where for the course of a single area you would have to avoid three projectiles at a time from an enemy on the far side of the room, while avoiding environmental damage form above, bats flying in from the side, crumbling tiles beneath your feet and still having to make perfectly timed jumps between ladders and platforms. These sections are maddening but not in a good way. They feel completely misplaced when compared to the rest of the level design. Why should this one room be that much harder than the others, and why did none of the rest of the level really prepare you for it? The first time you really encounter the crumbling tiles… is during one of these sections so you really have no clue what that block does until you have already failed at doing so.

Blood of the Werewolf 2014-10-12 10-34-13-316

The above section is what finally made me decide I was done for the morning. YOu have a series of crushers that are a one shot kill. They move in all sorts of directions, and extremely quickly. There are status indicators above or to the side of them that show you how long before the piston fires. They require perfecting timing to get through. There is a moment where at two lights, you have to wait a split second before jumping. If you jump immediately after the second light you jumped too soon and die. If you jump as the third light is coming on, you jumped too late and die. I could have handled one sequence of these pistons but after doing three in a row… and having a fourth one at the top of the ladder in the above screenshot… I just said fuck it and killed the game. I was not in the mood for that, especially when the rest of the game was actually rather enjoyable.

Rhinestone in the Rough

Given that it is the season of monster themed games, I figured playing Blood of the Werewolf was a good pick this week. Now comes the hard part… do I suggest this game to others. I can’t really say this game is a diamond in the rough, because there is quite a bit of rough that you have to deal with to get to where you can play it. The steam forums are full of issues folks have had with this game, and apparently if you are not using an xbox 360 controller… you are likely going to have issues with controller support as well. Like the subheading says this is more a Rhinestone in the Rough. There are definitely some shiny bits that are fun, but the thing that got me was the uneven progression of difficulty. If you really like Metroidvania style games, and there is an aspect of collecting bits that make you more powerful… and you don’t mind frustration games that can be down right unfair like say the Mega Man series… this might be a game for you.

If you wanted a game that you could install, boot up without issue and play through without the feeling of wanting to throw your controller… this is very much not a game for you. Thankfully like I said earlier the game right now is super cheap on Steam through the 15th for only $1.04. At that price, even dealing with the bullshit it is probably worth it if you are at all curious. Sadly despite its charm I will likely never boot this game up again. I feel like Outland is better at doing the things I like about Metroidvania in every single way, so in truth you would probably be better playing it or Guacamelee. If however you have massive amounts of nostalgia over the original Castlevania… this might be just the game you were looking for.

#BloodoftheWerewolf #AggroChat

Wrestling with DRM

October 11, 2014 by Belghast

Laptop Weekend

Here in Oklahoma it is a rainy nasty weekend. I pretty much rained all day yesterday, and this morning when I went out to get breakfast I ended up completely soaked. As such I have declared this weekend a “hang out on my laptop while curled up in blankets” weekend, and so far it has been pretty glorious. Unfortunately a good chunk of it has been updating my laptop, since it has probably been six month since I have regularly played down here. All in all it is not going terribly badly as I have had both my Vita and phone to play on while the laptop downloads patches and such. I have to say I have so much frustration over allowing myself to get sucked into a mobile game.

Years ago my wife and I used to play a game at the state fair that involved throwing tokens in the path of a sliding shelf that pushes coins off of the edge. I had always enjoyed this game, and that first year at the state fair we spent way too much money getting the swing of it. We played for hours and after about $50 spent all we had to show for it was a bullet keychain. In successive years I got better and started learning the little tricks, like you can trade in the crappy little gifts for more tokens to collect these poker chips in order to buy bigger prizes. That second year we walked away with a nice sized stuffed animal, and I think the third year we walked away with like five as we had figured out how to game the system.

Unfortunately Dragon Coins by Sega is exactly this game, but made even more addictive. You take the already addictive coin pusher mechanic and attach it to a pokemon like monster collection and evolution minigame… and you have a recipe for constant mobile addiction. Right now I am cursing Liores and Aro for talking about this game on the Cat Context podcast several times because finally I got curious enough to try it. Now I am afraid I am hooked. Thankfully as far as games go this one doesn’t feel too egregious yet. There is a ton of “free” content to play and so far I have not encountered any roadblocks that absolutely required me to purchase anything. It at least gives me something to play when I am out shopping with my wife.

Wrestling with DRM

One of the things that I spent last night installing and updating was Dragon Age: Origins. Since I intend to be spending a bit more time downstairs I figured playing DA:O while catching up on television was a good activity. I did not even have Origin installed on my laptop, so I went through the motions of doing that last night and then set to downloading Dragon Age Ultimate Edition. For whatever reason the DRM on that game and I have struggled throughout the years. It worked miraculously well upstairs when I reinstalled it a few weeks back so I thought maybe, just maybe Origin had worked out the kinks. When I went to set it up on the laptop apparently there are still issues because while it downloaded the base Dragon Age… it did not seem to download any of the addons.

To make matters worse windows 8 does not appear to like the Dragon Age Updater program and it just simply is not running on my laptop at all. So all of the directions from the Origin support site for restoring access to your addons does not appear to work at all. What I finally ended up doing was manually copying all of the addons from my desktop upstairs to the laptop over the network. Now when I boot up the game it appears to see everything just fine. But I could see someone with less patience giving up long before we reached that point. Dragon Age seemed to be a problem child, because I never went through any of the issues while playing any of the Mass Effect games. So here is hoping the DRM scheme for Dragon Age: Inquisition is equally unobtrusive.

Of note for those who have not played Dragon Age: Origins before and would like to in preparation for the launch of Dragon Age: Inquisition… it is now apparently available for free from origin. This game is well worth your time spent, and going back and playing it has made me remember just how much I loved the original game as compared to Dragon Age II. Honestly I am not in the “I Hate 2” camp, but the first game is simply better in every possible way. I figure just playing through the first one is more than enough to introduce you to the setting and its characters and conflicts. More than anything that was what I was trying to do while replaying the game, is to remember all of the intricate struggles.

The Grim Dark Future has Tradeskills

One of the problems I am having with Destiny is the fact that you reach this point in the end game where your entire life becomes about grinding otherwise meaningless things. There are folks who will farm level 2 mobs over and over for five hours in the rare chance of getting drops, or return to previous content areas feverishly hunting for spinmetal or any number of other crafting materials. Unfortunately these are not extreme players, but representative of the expected gameplay that games at the end of your twenty level story arc. The end game of Destiny involves the collection of otherwise unimportant bits that you then use to upgrade your armor slots, in hope of getting enough “light” out of it to push yourself up yet another level. Right now my life is about getting Spirit Bloom, Relic Iron and Plasteel… so it has me wandering aimelessly through the hunting zones in search of ground spawn nodes and chests.

My tolerance for mindless grinding is considerably higher than that of my friends, so while I am still able to find fun in this process… most of them have long since tapered off their play time. I have managed to push myself up to level 25 after doing a ton of upgrading. The problem is even I am not sure how much further I care to take the game when the end result is so damned repetitive. I suppose I could start trying to do the crucible, but I didn’t really get into this game for its player versus player gameplay. I realize I likely expected something out of Destiny that it will never really deliver, but up until the point I hit 20 I have to say I enjoyed all of the content from that point on. I even enjoy running the patrol missions because they give me little bursts of purpose… I just wish the patrol missions had a chance of rewarding you the crafting materials you need to progress. That ultimately would be a massive improvement that would breathe new life into the game for me. As of now Destiny is that game I play while waiting on something else, either waiting on my wife to get home, or waiting on something to spawn in Final Fantasy XIV.

#Destiny #DragonAge #DragonCoins

Commoditization of Content

October 10, 2014 by Belghast

Unlikely Inspiration

Yesterday morning I struggled to get my motor started, and when I finally did I latched onto the awesomeness that is Playstation plus. Unexpectedly it lead my brain through a series of hoops and ultimately inspired this mornings diatribe. It got me thinking about how my own patterns of game consumption or frankly media consumption in general. I have not watched television in going on two months when I really think about it. The very last show that I watched was the premiere of Doctor Who… and I watched that on the computer from a download. I am rapidly becoming less and less of a consumer of broadcast media and I think it might in part be connected to this as well. Ultimately I find television shows and movies less valuable today than I did a decade ago.

The real question is why exactly do I value it less, and the only answer I could reach is that it is so readily available. With broadcast media, I know that if I wait long enough a series will eventually show up on either Netflix of Amazon Prime and I can stream it for free. I also know that if I care enough about it I could always go find it through other means, but the reality is… that I simply don’t. I am happy to simply wait back for whatever it was that I wanted to watch to show up on Netflix. There are a number of shows that I have yet to even watch… that I likely would have devoured like mad during a different phase in my life. I’ve not watched any of Breaking Bad, only a smattering of Mad-Men and I have watched half of a season of Dexter. All three of these shows interest me… but for whatever reason I cannot be bothered to actually go through the process of watching them over doing something more interactive each night.

Commoditization of Content

I think the problem is that all of these shows are entirely too readily available. I know that at any point, on any evening… I could make a choice to sit down and watch them. So in theory I am putting it off because there is no risk involved in the decision. They are always there and available, so why should I prioritize watching them over doing something else. The only show that I really watch religiously is the Walking Dead, and in part I only do that because there will be Monday morning conversation at work over it. I prioritized watching the Doctor Who premiere because I knew it would similarly be the talk of my little group, but after watching the first show I can’t seem to be bothered to sit down and watch through the rest of them. The availability of these resources have made them less valuable in my mind… and essentially a commodity.

So you are thinking… “Bel why are you going down this line of thinking”. So I guess I am finding this is happening to my gaming as well. Right now games are readily available, and more so than they have ever been at any other time in my personal history. I can reach out and download a game in a matter of minutes or at worse case hours, and be playing it moments later. The problem is that because I am literally deluged in good games… I find myself valuing each individual one less. I have reached a point where I am almost entirely unwilling to pay the $60 new release price tag for almost all games. They tend to fall into one of two categories either I am waiting anxiously to play it and have already preordered (might I add preordered generally at a discount), or I am only interested in passing and I will wait until it is upwards to 75% off the initial sticker price before purchasing.

The Bundle and Steam Problem

Part of the problem and what has lead me to this point… are two things. Firstly the prevalence of various “Bundle” sites… Humble Bundle, Indie Royale and Indie Gala to name a few of the better ones. If it is new and edgy and independent… I know sooner or later it will end up in one of these bundles. As such I have simply stopped picking up any of these titles unless it DOES appear in a bundle, because I know if I simply wait long enough I can get it and a bunch of other games for the $5-$10 minimum price to get all of the content. Additionally Steam is constantly having some sort of weekly sale, and at least twice yearly they have these insane store wide sales where you can get games for up to 80% off. Sites like Good Ole Games are also complicit as well as Origin and any number of online retailers, all offering deep discounted sales in an attempt to keep up with the steam powered juggernaut.

All of this is teaching us to never pay retail price for anything gaming related. If we wait long enough and look hard enough we can find it for the price we want to pay, whatever that price point is. The problem is this has invaded all aspects of my gaming life. I didn’t want to pay full price for a PS4 or a Vita, even though I have gotten massive amounts of use out of both of them… nor did I my PS3. I shopped Craigslist for weeks looking for a PS4 or a Vita in the price range I was willing to pay, and ended up getting the PS4 for $250 and the Vita for $100. Similarly years ago I purchase a generation 1 “fat” PS3 off a friend who was no longer using it for $150. There would have been a time where I would have simply gone to the store and plunked down my $400 to walk out with a brand new console, but years of living in this new climate has caused me to question ALL retail prices.

Playstation Plus and Games with Gold

Playstation Plus takes things to a whole new level. There are so many games I would have at least purchased at a deeply discounted price, that I don’t now. Expecting that one day or another Sony will give the title away for free with my yearly Playstation Plus subscription. I held off purchasing the new Strider game exactly for this reason. I knew that they had a limited library of titles available to give away, and a commitment of giving away at least two new games for the PS4 each month… and I figured my chances were relatively likely that sooner or later they would be handing me a free copy of strider and they did. Similarly I did the same consideration with Dragon’s Crown and Rogue Legacy. On the later I figured it would have shown up in one of my Indie Bundles first, but the fact it showed up on consoles made me happy enough in any case. So as much as I love the current climate of giving me lots of content for very little money is a bit broken.

While there was a time at which I stood by the notion that Steam was helping things, by offering a place to sell games in bulk and allow the “economy of scale” to work for publishers… I seriously question that now. What I see instead is game companies struggling to move their content, and game studios closing as a result. While the $60 new game price point has not decreased… it certainly has not raised either… and is no longer adequately representing the cost of developing the type of game we expect. What I am seeing is a race to the bottom to see just how low the sale prices for digital content can go. Granted there are significantly fewer of the distribution headaches that go into pressing physical media, but there are still all of the real world expenses of running a games studio and paying anything closely resembling a living wage. What scares me is I think at this point the snowball is already careening towards the village, and there is nothing we can really do to stop it.

Is it Really a Problem?

I know I personally am extremely addicted to free or at least deeply discounted content, and I think most of the world is right there along with me. Even after everything I said… I question is there really a problem at all. Remember early on I said there were two buckets I divide games into… the ones I am willing to preorder and the ones I am willing to try if they become super cheap? There was a time where I would only be consuming the games from Bucket A and completely ignoring the games from Bucket B. I find myself more than willing to preorder the games I am really into, and even willing to pony up for the extra special happy deluxe velvet edition of them to make sure I am not missing out on any good bits. So the game company is almost always getting more than their $60 from me when a game exists in Bucket A.

What is different is they are also getting a small bit of money from me when a game lands in Bucket B. These are games I likely would not have played, or at least would not have purchased for myself. There are so many games I ignored completely until a friend handed me the game and told me to play it. As such when a Humble Bundle comes up I often times see it worth the risk to pay a little bit of money and get a ton of new games for me to sift through and see what I like and dislike. Admittedly there are so many bundle games out there that a good number of them I never actually play… but there are still a significant number that I do and end up loving. Then I end up blogging about them, and often times inspire more people to purchase them. So I guess the question is… are the games studios really missing money at all?

No Conclusions, Just Discussion

I mean I can see the real loss from games studios from the used game trade, especially when it is a store like Game Stop. They push those used copies super hard on customers, and when you are the Average Joe that $5-$10 off a game seems like a really good deal, or at least it does until they realize that they are going to have to pay that amount at least to buy a fresh clean network play code, or restore the DLC that only shipped with the disc. In any case that is taking someone who would have purchased the game for full price and converting them to re-buying a game that someone rushed through just to get the maximum resale value. I question however if the folks who are tossing games into Bucket B could really be considered a true loss. They are getting some money where they likely wouldn’t have before.

This reminds me a bit of the whole concept of “piracy” numbers. As a reformed pirate myself, there was a time in my life where when a game came out I turned to making a copy of someone else’s, or downloading it from my neighborhood warez distribution site. I think in part I am so willing to give money for games I will likely never play, because I am in a sense trying to pay back for all the times I couldn’t. I downloaded for lots of reasons… mostly because it was there, and I played a lot of games that I never would have purchased in a million years. I would say a good 90% of the games I downloaded should not have been considered lost profit from those companies. The games that I did care about… I still purchased by saving up my limited pennies and going to the store and getting a pretty boxed copy during the era when there were still interesting things like cloth maps to be found inside those games. So I feel like maybe the Bucket B games are a similar situation. I am giving them money, not a lot of it… but it is way more than they would have gotten out of me otherwise. Like the title of this section suggests… I don’t really have a firm conclusion… just a bunch of conversation I wanted to start. Hopefully folks will comment and add their thoughts to it. I know the industry is struggling, and I guess in part I am trying to wrap my head around it… and why I find myself valuing content in general less.

October PS+ Line-Up

October 9, 2014 by Belghast

Writers Block

I have to admit the last few mornings my blog post has been exceedingly difficult to write. For whatever reason the words that generally flow so freely have been clogged up. It feels like I just don’t have anything of any importance to talk about, which has never really stopped me in the past. I guess I am writing this morning to show that even if I blog every single day… I have days where I stare at the blank screen and can’t seem to figure out how to fill it. Generally speaking if I poke around the internet for a bit and in that effort something pops into my head. Today however all I really feel is tired. I’ve been trying to come down with something, and yesterday I had all but lost my voice. I keep thinking it is just allergies since I am not running a fever or anything, but not really sure at this point. More than likely it is since I am struggling under a constant deluge of drainage.

I think part of what is making this morning such a struggle is that last night was one of those nights where I couldn’t quite get comfortable in any game I played. I shifted between FFXIV, Dragon Age, Spunky, Destiny and even started Persona 4. When my wife got home I packed up the upstairs and took my Vita downstairs and hung out playing from bed. I have to say that is one of the coolest things about buying into the “Playstation” system is that everything interoperates so much better than the equivalent. I am even considering picking up a Playstation TV to add another screen to the equation. Right now pretty much anything I do on my PS4 I can do remotely, but my only desire is that the PS3 remote play worked better or more often. There are still a ton of titles that I would like to play on that system as Playstation Plus keeps releasing more of them.

Drive Club Plus

And there we have it folks… I have a topic to talk about. There has been a bit of controversy over the last few days because due to consequences Sony has had to back away from one of the promised titles as part of the October Playstation Plus lineup. Drive Club is a brand new game that is coming out for the PS4 and has been pretty hotly anticipated I might add. Through some financial trickery they cut a deal to offer it for free as part of the Playstation Plus subscription through a special Drive Club Plus edition. Granted this version did not include all of the tracks or cars, but was apparently otherwise fully functional. I was somewhat shocked when I read about it, since in essence this free copy would allow you to join clubs and race with your friends just like if you had purchased the full version. Additionally Plus members were going to be given the option to plunk down $50 to upgrade to the full fledged copy of the game and get all the bits and baubles they were missing.

Unfortunately as the game launched the servers being run for the game buckled under the weight. I feel like Sony made the right call here to delay giving this title away in an effort to help stabilize the launch. The truth is that folks plunked down money for the full priced version of the game, and they should come first. Granted this is coming from someone who has been a long time subscriber to Playstation Plus. The natives are restless however because a number of folks decided to pony up for Plus ONLY to get their free copy of Drive Club. The thing is that they are still going to get it… just not quite yet. What frustrates me is listening to the folks Rage about what is already the best deal in gaming hands down. Where else can you play $50 for an entire year and have six titles delivered to you every month. Even if you don’t like a few titles here and there… it is still a phenomenal deal.

October PS+ Line-Up

One of the tricks I learned several months back from my good friend Ashgar is that you didn’t actually have to log into the Playstation Store from any of your devices. There is one handy dandy web based interface where you can access all of your free monthly Playstation Plus titles, as well as queue them to download to any of your devices. So if you are a Playstation Plus member I highly suggest “purchasing” everything each month regardless if you want to play it or own the device. For ages I only has a PS3 and still found it a good deal… but all the while I was picking up titles for that console I was also picking them up for both PS4 and Vita knowing that someday I would end up picking up those consoles. When I got my PS4 I had over a half dozen titles sitting there waiting on me, and when I got my Vita I had around 50 titles that I could play. The subscription is a great deal but even more so when you have all of the consoles they are giving titles away for. This month seems to be significantly better than most of the recent ones, so I thought I would go into the titles available right now.

Spelunky

Available for PS4, PS3, Vita

This is a title I have wanted to play for some time, but never ended up grabbing it. The idea is that you are a cave explorer looking for treasure, and combating the traps you encounter along the way. What the game is known for is for being extremely unforgiving in that when you die your game is over and you respawn at the beginning of the area with nothing to show for your accomplishment. In that aspect it feels a little bit like Rogue Legacy without the whole generations aspect. I played it for a bit last night on the PS4 and had fun.

Pix the Cat

Available for PS4, Vita

This title looks to be a frantic mix of Pac Man and the classic Snake game that we all played so damned much on our Nokia 5120 phones. Look I am old… I had one of those phones and it was the only game available. This game seems perfectly suited for the Vita but is also available on PS4, and as part of the whole Bragtoberfest event I believe it was Murf that proposed a challenge to see who could get the highest score on this game. I have yet to crack it open but it is installed on both Vita and PS4 so I will get around to it eventually.

Dust: An Elysian Tail

Available for PS4

This is another game that I have wanted to play for some time. Hell I even own it on steam thanks to one of the many “indie bundles” that I have picked up over the years. The irony is that now that it is on a console I am actually far more likely to play it. I really like the Dual Shock 4 controller… and until I pony up the $60 to buy one for my PC, I am likely going to favor playing certain kinds of games on the PS4. Ultimately this is a really cool looking Metroidvania about a series of anthropomorphic animals as they go on a quest to do something or another. I really don’t know much about the story, but supposedly it is actually rather good. Looking forward to playing.

Rainbow Moon

Available for PS3, Vita

This game looks really cool, and I am not sure how it was completely off my radar. Essentially it looks like Final Fantasy Tactics by another developer to be truthful. The gameplay looks really similar, and I am hoping it is just as detailed and in depth. This will add yet another long form JRPG that I need to play on my Vita, as that device is quickly becoming almost exclusive for laying in bed and playing them. Last night for example I started Persona 4 Golden. The JRPG genre is really ideally suited for that handheld, and I am sure Rainbow Moon will be no different.

Dungeons and Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara

Available for PS3

This game… so much love for this game. For me at least this is the pinnacle of the 90s era arcade beat-em-up games. This is a collection of two arcade games, one of which was super rare here in the United States. What made it so damned awesome at the time was that you would sit down at this rather imposing looking machine with three of your friends and play your way through a choose your adventure style quest. At various points you are prompted for what exactly you are going to do… do you save the town or do you save the docks. Each step moves you down a branching path towards the conclusion. I loved this game so much that I ordered the import from Japan that was only available for the Sega Saturn. What makes this version awesome is that it supports network multiplayer just like the Steam copy, so a perfect excuse to go smash some kobolds with friends.

Batman Arkham Asylum

Available for PS3

So here comes confession time… I have never beaten this game or frankly made it terribly far into it. I have had it on Steam for ages, but when I first tried to play it, I attempted to play it with a keyboard and mouse and found the overall experience frustrating. I simply never went back and tried it again. What I find most interesting about this is that ages ago Playstation Plus gave away the later games, but we had yet to receive the original until now. As such I am looking forward to playing this as I didn’t want to jump in on the second or third game without playing the original. Something about it being on a console makes it seem more appealing.

And there you have it… this months line up of games. While don’t get Drive Club Plus yet, there is still a ton of awesome to be had there. What I love the most is that when they give away a game they generally also give away the cross buy rights, meaning if something is available on multiple platforms you can play it on whichever one you choose. Cross buy is one of those features that really endears me to the Playstation system of consoles, and especially since most of the newer titles also feature cross-save letting me start a game on my PS4 and then pick it up on the native vita client. In any case I personally think it is a pretty damned good month that will only get better when they finally unlock the keys to the Drive Club kingdom in a few weeks.

#DriveClub #PlaystationPlus